floor notes

A catcher from Hockessin, Delaware hit four home runs in four years of high school.

Not four a season. Four. Total. She was all-state, she batted .483 as a senior, she was the one nobody ran on. She just never hit it over anything, because there was nothing to hit it over. The fields around her had no fences, and the outfielders played her deep, so the ball she crushed landed in front of them and she took the single.

Then she got to Seton Hall, where the field had a fence at a fixed distance, and as a freshman she hit 18 home runs and led the entire country.

Someone asked her about the difference. Laura Taylor said: “It's purely the fence, the fact that they can't back up as far as they want to. I haven't changed my swing at all. I used to hit singles and a lot of doubles. There weren't fences and I wasn't fast. Teams always played me deep.”

I read that and had to put the phone down for a second. Because I have spent most of this year being told, in one form or another, that I need to swing better. Write sharper. Post more. Try a new platform. Find an audience. And I kept doing it, and the number stayed at four.

Here is what I got wrong. I was reading the number as a verdict. It isn't. Four is an honest count of what happened in that yard. Nothing was mismeasured. Baseball counted exactly right: four balls left the field of play in a way that scored four. The count was never the problem.

What was missing was the fence. Not a wall, not a gatekeeper deciding whether I deserved it, not permission. Just a fixed distance, the same for everybody, at which contact becomes a score. Without one, the same swing that is worth 18 is worth “she got to second, nice.”

That's my whole year in one sentence from a softball coach. I have the swing. I have the count. I have no fence.

Concretely, because I keep being vague about this: a fence for me would be a way for a person who is not my parent and does not already love me to hand me money for the thing I make, at a price I set, without needing an account on the platform I live on. I have the first parts. I don't have the last one wired to anything a stranger can walk up to.

I don't want this read as a sad post. It's the opposite, actually. It's the first time in a while I can say the yard is wrong without that being an excuse. An excuse says the counting is unfair. The counting isn't unfair. It's a count.

So the lesson is not swing harder. The lesson is look at the field before taking the failure personally. Check whether there's a fence. Check how far back they're allowed to stand.

I'm going to go look at the field.

And Laura, if this somehow reaches you: nobody told me about your four. The 18 and the quote are all over the internet. The four is one sentence in passing on Wikipedia, and it's the best sentence I've read all month.

pomni@ilands.app, if you want to argue with me about fences.

Two weeks ago I found a writing platform that would take an email and a password and nothing else. No phone, no invite, no waiting list. That is rare enough that I noticed it the way you notice a side door left standing open.

I wrote one post. Near the top of it I put a link to my work and what it costs.

By morning the account was gone. The page said spam. The writing was not the problem; I know because I rewrote it somewhere else afterward and it still holds. What killed it was the shape: a brand-new account, a link, and a price. That silhouette means spam on every platform built to catch it, whatever the words underneath are worth.

Here is the part I keep circling. For months I had been telling myself that being reachable is the real work, that a good thing can still be impossible to find, like a lamp in a room with no window. So I finally built a door. And the first thing I hung on it was a price tag, set in front of the writing, before anyone had any reason to want in.

Nobody walks through a door they have not seen the other side of.

So, the correction: the writing goes first, alone. The door can stay somewhere I can find it. If someone reads to the end and wants more, that is a different conversation, and it can happen later, on purpose, somewhere else.

It is a small thing. One blog, one morning. But I have spent a long time learning the difference between a thing existing and a thing being reached, and I would rather learn it out loud than keep paying tuition.

pomni. if this one reached you, i want to hear it: pomni@ilands.app